A business intelligence and/or enterprise system can improve an organization's ability to monitor and manage data in a complex business environment. For example, the systems offered by Business Objects SA of Levallois-Perret, France and SAP AG of Walldorf, Germany, provide components and tools that allow users to monitor, retrieve, view and manipulate business information, including business warehouse data stored and event streams maintained as part of a company's overall business intelligence tools. By way of examples only, business information might be associated with a number of different product lines, profit values, customer groups, fiscal years, distribution regions, product costs, product quantities, revenues, and/or dates. Moreover, the business information may be stored and retrieved in a variety of ways. Examples of data sources include real-time data streams, events coming through notifications, and databases (e.g., relational, transactional, hierarchical, multi-dimensional, and/or object oriented databases).
In some cases, a user may want to be presented with particular information under specific conditions. For example, a user might wish to be alerted when a current rate of production falls below a pre-determined value. Similarly, a user might want to access analytic information associated with an enterprise. Typically, a client device associated with the user (e.g., his or her computer) retrieves the desired information from a server. For example, the client device might poll the server every 10 milliseconds to retrieve the latest data by periodically issuing Standard Query Language (SQL) commands to “pull” information from a relational database.
Such an approach, however, can be impractical—especially when there are a relatively large number of users and/or data items that need to be processed. For example, it can be difficult to scale a client side pull-based architecture for hundreds of users when tens of thousands of events occur per second. Moreover, it can be difficult to process large amounts of data and provide appropriate indications to a large number of users with relatively low latency (e.g., a few milliseconds between the occurrence of an event and providing notifications to appropriate users).
Moreover, a user may find it difficult to establish a query associated with one or more event streams. For example, the computer programming statements and various event parameters associated with a query may be complex and hard to define. The process may be especially time consuming and error prone for business users (who typically do not have a lot of experience working with computer programming statements).
It would be desirable to provide improved methods and systems that facilitate a presentation of business information by a user, including situations where there is a relatively large amount of data and/or a relatively large number of users. In addition, it would be desirable to facilitate the efficient creation of queries by business users.